We spent the days after he arrived hunting, making many trips to the herd, and carrying back quarters on travois we rigged up. Now we have most of five buffalo hanging frozen from limbs, and we all eat madly, never getting enough even when our stomachs ache. He will leave us some mules so we can hunt some more. But we have no safe place to keep them and little feed for them. M. Fitzhugh has been bringing them right into our new post each night to keep them from being stolen. And by day, my task will be to herd them and shave green cottonwood bark with the new drawknife for them to chew on.
Papa, we have had a hard time, but M. Fitzhugh and M. Chatillon will tell you about that. We built a rectangular post of rock and mud and poles, and got it sealed just when the winter grew bitter. It has wide fireplaces at either end that eat wood, but they don’t keep us very warm. There is still so much to do. The engagés are sawing wood into planks for shelving in the trading room; building partitions of squared poles. Soon there will be a dormitory for the engagés, with a kitchen at one end; a separate room for M. Fitzhugh and — I was about to say Mme. Fitzhugh, but she is gone and we have no news of her. And on the other end of the building, there will be a warehouse for the robes at the rear, and the trading room at the front.
All this consumes the energies of us all, papa. You can’t imagine it. Just sawing plank with the two-man saw is a task that wears the engagés out, but now at least they renew themselves with the buffalo, which is a strong meat and makes them well again. The ironware you sent is magnificent, and you picked it perfectly. M. LaBarge must have told you we would need it. The doors swing on hinges. The nails and bolts are useful to furnish the trading room. We have yet to build a robe press for baling the robes — but then, we have no robes to press anyway. One of the engagés, Dauphin, scraped the rawhide of two does very thin, and then stretched the wet hides on the frames of two windows, one in the trading room and one in the dormitory. Now we can open shutters and get some faint amber light. Enough to see our way around without a fire or lantern. But oh, for glass!
Papa, M. Chatillon came to me privately and inquired about my health and happiness. He said I could go back with him if I wished; that you would approve, and welcome me. He said the trip would be hard and cold, but he could get me safely back, even in winter. I thought about it and said no. I’m well now, though I was very sick in October, and lonely. I wanted to go home then, papa. I miss you and maman, and the warmth of our house, and my friends, and all the comforts of St. Louis. But I will stay. I am needed. M. Fitzhugh is desperately short of hands. And the whole enterprise is so perilous and close to disaster that perhaps I can be of service. I have learned to cook whatever they bring us, and take care of things that Mme. Fitzhugh took care of before she went to visit her Cheyenne people. We know nothing of that, papa, and M. Fitzhugh says nothing.
Neither do we know anything about the theft of the blankets on the riverboat. It is much in my mind, finding who did this thing to hurt Dance, Fitzhugh, and Straus — but nothing is said, and M. Fitzhugh seems to have forgotten it. Thank heaven you sent the osage orange bow wood. M. Fitzhugh and M. Trudeau looked at those dried orange wands exclaiming and smiling. They say, though, they don’t know what the bow wood will bring. They hope for a robe apiece, but maybe they will have to give two of the sticks for a robe.
I meant to write a journal, but I have become lazy, and most nights I crawl into my blankets without doing what I intended. I also intended to copy down useful information into my notebook. I got the parts of the buffalo into it, and their utility. And I am making a list of roots and berries and seeds one can eat, with a drawing of each plant. But I wanted to do more. I wanted to list the words I have learned. I have a few under the Cheyenne heading, but I don’t have many Crow words, and hardly any Sioux. They called the buffalo Pte. I’ve collected flowers and moths and dried them in the pages, too. I’m trying to learn the trades practiced by the engagés. I can fix my boots if the uppers pull from the soles, and I can square a log with an adze. Some day I will know more than all these men do because I have my schooling, too. I am reading the Psalms, one each night when I can.
Soon they will celebrate Christmas. M. Fitzhugh says there will be a buffalo hump feast, and he will give each engagé a gill of spirits. M. Chatillon promised to stay that long, but he will leave directly after that. There’s too much to do, and they will not make a sabbath of the day, except for the feast the evening before. There is much cheer among them, now that we have warmth and food and the mules to hunt more.
After Christmas, we must get our outfit from Fort Cass, and that is something I fear most of all, because its bourgeois, M. Hervey, is not inclined to give our things to us, and made a great show of keeping M. Fitzhugh away from our company goods. I remonstrated with him, telling him — through the window of the Cass trading room — how we paid rent; how he must protect our property by contract and by honor, and how he must not do us a wrong. But he only laughed, and I fear M. Fitzhugh made a terrible mistake storing the outfit there, in the possession of our rivals.
He says he had no roof for his tradecloth and ginghams and bed ticking and all the rest, and it was safest there. But, papa, I question that. We could have kept the perishable things under wagonsheet with us, and let the rest of it — things like axes — be exposed. But he said it would all be stolen. I don’t see much difference between it being stolen by American Fur and stolen by Crows or Blackfeet.
Papa, I have confided some things to M. Chatillon that he is to discuss with you. They concern M. Fitzhugh. Our partner in this enterprise is a violent man who will not stop at murder and seems to know little of the laws of God, of right and wrong, good and evil. He says they don’t apply here, and it’s every man for himself. But of course they apply everywhere the Eye of God sees mortals. He engaged in certain conduct toward our rival, M. Hervey, that I won’t describe here except to say it was lethal. That does not seem the way to engage in peaceful trading, or get along with rivals in a sea of wilderness where civilized men must help each other on occasion and forget their divisions. No, papa, I fear we have the wrong man as a principal in this business. You wished me to be the Straus family eyes and ears, and I am that, and its conscience too. I fear if we are allied with M. Fitzhugh we might find blood on our hands. Indirectly, of course, but still there, staining us. From what I’ve heard, he is no match for Julius Hervey in that department, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and I wish he could find other means. The trouble really began when he stored all the outfit there. It was bad judgment. Now, on the eve of trading, we have nothing to trade with except the osage orange. The Crow are hostile to us, whipped up by Hervey.
I have tried to explain this to M. Fitzhugh, and have urged him to do what is proper, and enter into peaceful congress with Julius Hervey, but he only resists and lets me know with a dismissing smile that I’m not yet a man in his eyes.
So — everything depends on what happens next. The Buffalo Company will get its outfit and begin trade, or it will collapse. It will take in many robes from many tribes at an advantage, or it will lose everything you invested. It is something that awakens me in the night.
I miss you and maman terribly, and David and Clothilde too, and our Gregoire, and St. Louis. I am a long way from home. I pray this letter, and our news, and M. Chatillon, reach you safely.
Your son,
Maxim
Twenty-Five
* * *
Westwinds robbed the twenty-fourth day of December of its cold, freeing imprisoned men to pleasure themselves in the cottonwoods, cutting fire logs or lumber for the interior of the post. Fitzhugh knew he had a letter to write to Straus, and it could no longer be put off. Ambrose Chatillon wanted to leave at once, Christmas eve, to take advantage of the mild. An express was just that; it could never wait, though Brokenleg desperately wanted Chatillon to hang on until after the first of the year.
He settled himself before the wide fireplace and dipped his steel nib into some thick ink Maxim had concocted from car
bon black, water, and some spirits. The task seemed worse than a whipping but had to be performed. He’d written little since his youth as an innkeeper’s son, and the nib pen felt awkward in his fingers. But not half so awkward as telling his partner, the company’s financier, that he hadn’t traded for a single robe, and that the whole trading outfit lay in the bowels of Fort Cass, hostage to the whims of Julius Hervey. And yet — that very information, gotten to Straus, could be valuable. A word to Chouteau might help matters.
He scribbled it out, then, in harsh angry strokes, wasting no words, concealing nothing, not even Dust Devil’s desertion, which was mostly his own business. He explained without apology his reason for storing the outfit at Cass. That was his judgment. If Straus didn’t like it, too bad. Somehow the drafting evoked a fury in him, so that he glared imperiously about the barracks, daring anyone to say a word. Most were outside, but Ambrose Chatillon had busied himself with his preparations. He’d have his Christmas gill, and slip out into the night to begin a two-month journey downriver in the heart of the winter.
Beside the fire, Chatillon was drying thin slabs of buffalo flesh on a rack, and shredding cooked meat into small chunks, which he mixed with melted tallow and spooned into tied off boudins, making crude sausages rich with fat that would not only last for weeks, cold or warm, but would nourish a man better than plain meat on a winter’s day. A growing mountain of the gray sausages rose at his side.
“I wish you’d stay, Ambrose. I got needs. If we can’t get the outfit from Hervey, I’d take it kindly if you’d go on up to Fort Union and talk to Culbertson. He’ll bring Hervey to heel, I reckon.”
“An express is an express. And it’s out of my way, Brokenleg.”
Irritation flooded Fitzhugh. “If you’d stay long enough to see about this business, you could tell Straus how the stick floats.”
Ambrose shrugged, and spooned meat and tallow into a boudin.
Fitzhugh knew he was getting nowhere with his old trapping friend. “Well, at least stop at Cass. I got two friends wintering there. Worse come to worse; I’m counting on them opening the gates for us some night and letting us fetch our outfit.”
Chatillon stared. “Who?”
“Abner Spoon and Zachary Constable.”
“Ah, names from the rosters of the dead. The beaver days are over, Brokenleg. Gone under. Those two, they winter with American Fur every year now, and trade a few plews with the company.” Chatillon said nothing more, but something in his tone left matters hanging.
“You sayin’ something to me?”
Chatillon smiled and shrugged.
“We hooted and hollered through many a rendezvous, Ambrose. The beaver men was always true.”
“That was years ago. The beaver, they are worthless. Trapped out anyway. We get buffalo robes, now, yes?”
Fitzhugh pondered that, his mind boiling like a teakettle. “Well then I need ye all the more, Ambrose.”
“Be careful. Don’t let Hervey kill you. And don’t kill him.”
“I’d as soon shoot him first chance I get.”
“My friend, I think Hervey would like that.”
Chatillon turned to his preparations, wrapping the bulging boudins in oilcloth and stuffing them into a pannier of his pack. Fitzhugh reckoned the man had cured or cooked about fifty pounds of buffalo meat and tallow. Not enough to get him to St. Louis, but enough to get him to any post along the way — Fort Clark, or Pierre, or even down to Bellevue. He’d forcefed his horse and mule for days, even cutting some tall grass on the opposite side of the frozen river with a sickle.
Fitzhugh attacked the rest of his letter savagely, feeling a need to defend himself to Straus. He hadn’t lost a man. He’d raised a post out of nothing. Maxim had been sick but was hardening now. He’d fetch the trading outfit from Cass. He’d bring down good returns in the spring. He’d wagon out to the villages and trade. The osage orange bow wood would help. The ironware brought by Chatillon was perfect.
He couldn’t think of a thing more, so he scratched Robert Fitzhugh across the bottom, waved the foolscap to dry it, and folded it up. He had no envelope.
“Put this in oilcloth,” he said. Chatillon took it wordlessly and snugged it into a waterproof portfolio, beside Maxim’s letter.
“Have you any message to him you don’t wish to entrust to paper, Brokenleg?”
“Yeah. I’m bringing down a mess of robes next spring. If I don’t get my outfit peaceable from Hervey — the whole thing — I’ll steal his robes. But I’ll bring robes.”
Chatillon grinned wryly, and said nothing.
“And tell him you wouldn’t stay here long enough to help bust the outfit loose from Hervey, even after I asked.”
Christmas cheer. In the early dark his engagés settled around a feisty fire to feast on succulent meat around the bossribs of a cow buffalo. And to sip the gill of pure grain spirits mixed with riverwater as slowly as possible. And to find things to say to men who’d heard everything they had to say, many times over. Larue, Bercier, Lemaitre, Brasseau, Dauphin, Trudeau and the rest. Men he knew now; men who toiled like mules, starved and froze and bled for Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus. Their sweat had yielded them twelve dollars a month, which they would spend entirely on items from the trading room when it was stocked. There were things about life he couldn’t fathom, and brute labor for almost nothing was one of them. And yet, they’d come here not for the wage, but for the tantalizing something that set men of the borders apart from all other mortals. Perhaps they were paid in memories, he thought. Tomorrow, Christmas day, they would toil again.
Scarcely had they devoured the buffalo hump than Ambrose Chatillon slid into his hooded white capote and began saddling his pack mule and horse out in the unheated warehouse area, where he’d kept them nights. The men turned silent. Not many of them would venture into an arctic void upon a seven or eight-week journey. Moments later he led his burdened animals toward the front door, bid his hosts adieu and joyeux noel, and slid like a gliding owl into a moonless dark that would stretch ahead of him unchecked by reason.
It shocked them, and a foreboding lay upon the barracks, not just for the fate of Chatillon, but their own. Not a one of the engagés bantered further, but turned his thoughts inward so that men peered toward the fire, testing the flames for comfort and finding none. Chatillon would not follow the Yellowstone northeastward, but cut overland across a naked emptiness to the Missouri somewhere near Fort Pierre, and then ever south and east, tiptoeing like a soul past the devil.
Maxim looked stricken. The boy was obviously regretting he had chosen to stay.
“It’s not too late, boy,” Fitzhugh said.
Maxim didn’t reply, but sank into his private anguish.
The raw stone room seemed too full of stinking mortals, so Fitzhugh pulled himself up and stomped life into his bad leg. Then he twisted into his fringed elkskin coat and caromed out into the night. He found the air quiet and mild, friendlier than the warmth he’d left. He liked the stillness, the dead-winter hush that let a man think without being hounded by babble and hate and conceit and stupidity. Chatillon had vanished into a moonless velvet void. Fitzhugh sucked torrents of air into the bottoms of his lungs, savoring its purity after the rancid odors inside.
He enjoyed this place they’d ransomed from nothing, though he couldn’t say just why. Perhaps because he’d bought it with his blood, sweat and experience. The way things had gone, maybe he was the dumbest ole coon in the woods. From this very doorjamb, terror stretched in concentric circle outward, and he understood that in a way that would elude city-bred people. It sharpened his eyes and smell and hearing. People back in the settled world didn’t know how a free land like this honed a man’s instincts, turned him cunning and crazy. This post would be his passport to the unmapped beyond. He’d turned wild, like some dog joining a wolfpack, and he couldn’t live any other way. He couldn’t bring the beaver days back, but this — this was a tolerable imitation of them, and it gave him the thing he wanted mo
st: a few more years, a few more decades, of living free as an eagle riding the unfenced sky, before it all vanished beneath the wheels of Conestogas.
He didn’t care much about money, but this — this was almost as fine as plucking fat beaver out of snowmelt streams, skinning and stretching the plews as if they were round dollars, hoorawing the cynical stars, and buying all the fixings a man might need at rendezvous. Oh, the ambrosia of scented pine and balsam on a sundrenched alpine slope; oh, the carpets of lupine bluing a meadow and the whistle of an elk at night. Oh, the senses multiplied and grafted by wilds, the alchemy turning smoke into incense, and every mountain brook a vintage wine, a fountain of youth. Oh, where’d the beaver gone, and the beaver men, and the high times around a thousand joyous fires whipping into a spark-lit black, and the wild walks across the top of the world? Gone, and nothing but the slaughter of buffalo to pinion the memory in his skull for a little while before it all ebbed away.
The void beyond his vision lay dark and evil, and he sensed its menace. It held the terror of total possibility. Nothing here kept Hervey from killing him or him from killing Hervey. He hoped it’d always be that way; as empty a century hence as it was now. It elated him, this triumph of possibility. A man had to turn half wolf just to deal with it. Maybe, just maybe, all the timid souls back east would quit coming this way, just quit, and leave all this to himself and the few who braved this life. Fancy notions on a Christmas eve, he thought.
He grieved on the doorjamb while the stars rotated, and then thought of Dust Devil and he missed her. She of the almond eyes and apricot flesh. She scorned everything not Cheyenne, and among her Cheyennes scorned everything not Suhtai, and among her Suhtai, scorned everything not her clan and medicine. She despised him, plain as the pride on her face. And he loved her for it, the way a man might love a bobcat or stroke a porcupine. And perversely, she loved what she despised. He missed her in some well of soul where she’d festered into comfort. He wanted her, scorning and snapping and teasing. He knew she loved him, in spite of his affliction of being born white.
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